Hello to All That

THE BLACK BOOK (250 pp.)--Lawrence Durrell--Dufton ($4.95).

Newspapers constantly relay the rejoicings of the sweepstakes winner and the parent whose kidnaped child has been found alive. And LIFE once photographed that rare dawning in which a young girl first realizes that she will be beautiful.

Another sort of epiphany is less familiar: that moment of astonishment and nascent arrogance when a beginning author discovers that he is a very good writer.

Lawrence Durrell, whose recent quartet of novels about Alexandria are as popular in upper Bohemia as clam dip, made the discovery in 1936 when at 24, he wrote The Black Book. This first novel is a glittering, exultant, outrageous act of self-indulgence, and the reader needs no dust-jacket exegesis to tell him that this is the work of a brilliant boy. Durrell raises up laments to the bleakness of life, bathes in scorn and sorrow the wretched creatures who must live it, sets down prose odes to the godawfulness of England. The outlook is determinedly fungoid, yet the tone is perversely gleeful. The author is gloriously drunk with sex, sin, scorn, youth and his own deflowering genius.

Alexia? The language is that of a literary acrobat cockily performing newly-learned tricks and listening slyly for applause. In one neon-streaked passage, Durrell preens so obviously that his arrogant virtuosity is amusing: "I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia. abulia? It is life.''* The narrator, a knockabout literary sort named Lawrence Lucifer, gloats over sex, happily flexes his ability to shock ("I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile bundle of meat'').

Murk & Manifesto. Surprisingly, this impudent performance is not as annoying as it might be. Durrell's spirits are so buoyant that they earn the reader's indulgence. His posturings are taken as overdrafts on respect well repaid by later books, and so is his blatant mimicry of such authors as Lawrence, Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller (to whom Durrell sent the only typescript of the book with the coy instruction to read it and throw it in the Seine).

Very little happens in The Black Book; it is all murk and manifesto. One meets a menagerie of physical and spiritual cripples--Tarquin, a homosexual; Lobo, a whoremonger; Clare, a gigolo; Gregory, a poet whose feelings chafe against a talent one size too small. These tortured grotesques are insignificant, but they prefigure the Alexandria novels. So does the fetid brilliance of the passages in which

Durrell imitates no one, and so does the author's inability, or unwillingness, to write narrative. This impressive school piece is ironically named, for in it the reader sees a powerful talent find its place in the sun, yawn with pleasure and stretch itself luxuriously.

*Translation: "Is this loss of ability to read music, loss of ability to understand spoken or written language, loss of ability to write, a disease involving loss of ability to understand print, mental impairment in which volition is lost?"

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